I keep wondering if the fog will EVER lift, or if this is permanent. She's a smart woman. This stuff can't really make sense in her head. How do you not know what you want? Or not make an effort to find out? It vexes me.
I used to ask myself these questions, too. Even before my W's MLC went full blown, when I'd ask her what she was thinking or feeling about something, she'd usually reply, "I don't know". It absolutely blew my mind that somebody truly could not know their own thoughts or feelings about anything. One day, after a long time of hearing "I don't know", I was so frustrated and sick of it, that I just blew up at her. I yelled at her, "What do you mean you don't know?!?!? Of course you know!!!"
After all, everybody knows what they're thinking or feeling, right?
Well....I know better now.
The best analogy I can draw for all of this is the pressure chamber scene in the movie "An Officer and a Gentleman". Did you ever see the movie? Remember the scene where all the officer candidates are doing simple test tasks in the chamber, like playing patty cake or naming off playing cards as they are drawn from a deck? It's simple, run-of-the-mill stuff that everybody can do....until the oxygen in the chamber is cut back. Then the simple tasks become much more challenging. The patty cake players are much less coordinated and the guy labeling off the cards starts to have difficulty thinking, concentrating and speaking.
I guess my point here is that, to the people outside the test chamber, the people inside the chamber look like friggin' idiots! Who on earth goes from being able to think straight and do simple tasks in one instance, to being unable to perform the same way the next time?
But the people inside the chamber experience a much different reality than the ones outside. Imagine yourself in the chamber trying to communicate effectively to somebody outside the chamber, when you can't think straight or even concentrate on what it is that you're saying. My best guess is that, in that instance, you're going to be more focused on what is happening to you, than you are on what other people on the outside are thinking about you and your actions.
And here we are, on the outside of the chamber, wondering why our spouses on the inside can't see what is so clear to us "out here".....
Make sense?
PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE CONQUER ALL THINGS. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
DBing and MLC take their toll....Please provide exact CHANGE. -Jimbo
